Quote of the Moment: Secret of Bejeweled Blitz's success

"There are really two key factors to Bejeweled Blitz's success and virality. One is that when we did it, we made it one minute... The second thing we're doing is resetting the leader board every week...

So my analogy here is of pool. My dad is really good at pool and I am mediocre at pool. In the way most leader boards in games work is like a lifetime leader board, which is like saying my father's best game at pool is versus my best game at pool. And that means that he's always going to win that because he's really good at pool. And that's not fun, right?

However in real life, when we play pool, it's reset every time we play. If I win, we then have the social context to know that, "I'm a mediocre player and I just beat your ass, Dad, haha!" He grumbles and tries to kick my ass the next time we play, and it's fun.

So by resetting the leader board every week, it makes it more about the temporal experience. You know Dave [pointing at PopCap CEO David Roberts] here might be better than me, but if I beat him in a certain week because he hasn't played much, I can still feel good because "Oh, I beat you"--even though normally he's beating me."PopCap co-founder Dave Vechey explains Bejewled Blitz's mass appeal in CNET's in-depth Q&A.